I am faced with the following problem: Servers get saturated since current load balancing strategy is based on client IP. Some corporate clients access our servers from behind large proxies so all clients appear with same IP to our load balancer. I think we are using some hardware load balancing device (can investigate further if necessary). We need to maintain session affinity (site is constructed in ASP), so all requests with same IP get routed to the same node.

Since all the communication goes over the HTTPS, no request data (like session Id) is available to balancer as a client discriminator. Is there a way to use some other data besides the IP to distinguish between clients and route the clients even when coming from same IP to different nodes?

Note: I need to maintain the traffic between the balancer and nodes safe (encrypted).